What was the secret of Steve Jobs’ success?

1: “As the sun was setting over the Hudson River on a brisk October day two men stood on the terrace of a luxury apartment building overlooking New York’s Central Park,” writes Carmine Gallo in his powerful book The Storyteller’s Secret: From TED Speakers to Business Legends, Why Some Ideas Catch on and Others Don’t

“One man, a rebellious 26-year old, dressed in a mock turtleneck and blue jeans, stared at his running shoes for a long time without saying a word. Then, as quickly as a light switch moves from off to on, he turned to the man by his side – a successful corporate executive who was one month shy of his forty-fifth birthday- and delivered the words that would transform the lives of both men and change the business world forever.

“Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?” Steve Jobs asked John Sculley, then President of PepsiCo.

John had just turned down Steve’s offer to run Apple. He remembers the question landed like a “punch in the gut.” He would change his mind and choose to join Apple.

2: Upon hearing the news of Steve’s death in 2011, John remarked, “Steve Jobs was intensely passionate at making an important difference in the lives of his fellow humans while he was on the planet. He never was into money or measured his life through owning stuff.”

Intensely passionate.

This week we are continuing our exploration of the principles of storytelling which Carmine outlines in his book. He believes storytelling is a critical 21st-century skill for business leaders.

Story explains why “many ideas fail to gain traction, while others trigger global movements. It explains why many leaders fail to inspire their teams, while others persuade people to walk through walls,” Carmine writes.

It starts with passion.

“It’s nearly impossible to be a successful storyteller without passion,” writes Carmine. “Passion leads to energy and without energy, enthusiasm, and excitement it becomes very difficult to hold an audience’s attention.”

Inspiring storytellers are inspired themselves.

Steve Jobs “captivated our imaginations because he had a wild and wondrous appreciation for how technology could change the world and he had the courage to express it,” Carmine writes.

Upon returning to Apple in 1997, Steve said: “This is a very complicated world. It’s a very noisy world and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we need to be really clear on what we want them to know about us… Apple’s core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.”

Business leaders and aspiring entrepreneurs are wise to take note. We must be clear on what we want people to know about us.

3: Carmine outlines four questions to help us articulate what we are passionate about. The first question applies to founders, but the remaining three apply to all business people.

1: Why did you start a company?

2: What does your company do?

3: What are you passionate about?

4: What makes your heart sing?

“Don’t ask, ‘What do I want to do?’ Ask yourself, ‘What makes my heart sing?'” Carmine suggests.

More tomorrow.

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Reflection: What makes my heart sing?

Action: Journal about my answers to Carmine’s four questions above.

Can our mindset change the way we experience stress?

1: Imagine a job interview.

An extra stressful job interview where the interviewer barks negative feedback no matter what we say or do.

“Do you think gender inequality in the workplace is still a problem?” The interviewer asks. 

We start to answer, but the interviewer interrupts, “That’s a bad example.  Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Stop uttering ‘uh’ and ‘um,'” the interviewer growls.  “Why aren’t you looking me in the eyes?  Your posture lacks confidence.” 

Does that sound stressful?

Actually, that’s the goal.

2: Scientist Alia Crum runs the Behavioral Research Lab at Columbia University.  Her research focuses on the impact of stress, Kelly McGonigal recounts in her excellent book, The Upside of Stress.

Prior to participating in the mock interview described above, participants are shown one of two videos. 
One half of the group watches a video that begins with an ominous announcement: “Most people know that stress is negative . . . but research shows that stress is even more debilitating than you expect,”  Kelly writes. 

The video then describes how stress can harm your health, happiness, and work performance.

The second video, which the other half of the group watches begins, “Most people think that stress is negative . . . but actually research shows that stress is enhancing,” Kelly writes

The video then describes how stress can improve performance, enhance well-being, and help us grow.

After watching the short videos, the participants take part in the mock interviews described above where they receive unrelenting negative feedback from the trained interviewers.

“The goal of the study is to manipulate participants’ views of stress and then watch how their bodies respond to a stressful situation,” writes Kelly.  

As a participant herself, she notes, “Even though I knew that the whole thing was a carefully scripted experiment designed to throw me off balance, it was still stressful.”

Following the interviews, the scientists then test the participants’ saliva to measure the ratio of two stress hormones: DHEA to cortisol, which is called the “growth index” of a stress response.  We need both hormones, and neither is “good” nor “bad,” Kelly notes.  However, higher levels of cortisol relative to DHEA are associated with worse outcomes, including impaired immune function and depression. 

“A higher growth index—meaning more DHEA—helps people thrive under stress.  It predicts academic persistence and resilience in college students, as well as higher GPAs.  During military survival training, a higher growth index is associated with greater focus, less dissociation, and superior problem-solving skills, as well as fewer post-traumatic stress symptoms afterward,” Kelly notes.  “The growth index even predicts resilience in extreme circumstances, such as recovering from child abuse.”

3: Scientist Alia Crum’s study was testing to see if changing people’s perceptions of stress could modify this measure of resilience.

“Could a three-minute video about stress alter this key ratio of stress hormones?” Kelly writes.

The short answer?  Yes.

The participants who watched the stress-is-enhancing video before the interview released more DHEA and had a higher growth index than the participants who watched the stress-is-debilitating video.

“Viewing stress as enhancing made it so – not in some subjective, self-reported way, but in the ratio of stress hormones produced by the participants’ adrenal glands,” Kelly notes.  “Viewing stress as helpful created a different biological reality.”

How we think about stress impacts how our body reacts to stress.

Mindset matters.  With stress.  As well as with many other aspects of our lives.

More tomorrow.
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Reflection:  What is my mindset about stress?  What are the implications of Alia Crum’s research on me?

Action:  Journal about it.

Does scaring people motivate them to change?

1: What is the effect of showing smokers graphic warnings on cigarette packs?

When doctors are asked this question, “In general, they believe that the images will decrease smokers’ desire for a cigarette and motivate them to quit,” writes Kelly McGonigal in her terrific book The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It.

Actually, studies show the warnings have the opposite effect.  

“The most threatening images (say, a lung cancer patient dying in a hospital bed) actually increase smokers’ positive attitudes toward smoking,” Kelly states.

The reason? 

The images trigger fear.  And, “what better way to calm down than to smoke a cigarette?” Kelly observes.

The physicians assume fear would inspire people to change their behavior, but being afraid motivates us to soothe our uncomfortable feelings and escape feeling bad.

2: “Another strategy that consistently backfires is shaming people for their unhealthy behaviors,” Kelly writes.  
“In one study at the University of California, Santa Barbara, overweight women read a New York Times article about how employers are beginning to discriminate against overweight workers.  Afterward, instead of vowing to lose weight, the women ate twice as many calories of junk food as overweight women who had read an article on a different workplace issue.”

There is a pattern.  

“Well-intentioned doctors and psychologists convey a message they think will help; instead, the recipients end up overwhelmed, depressed, and driven to self-destructive coping behaviors,” she reflects.

3: Kelly is a health psychologist and lecturer at Stanford University.  For years she “taught classes and workshops, conducted research and wrote articles and books… [telling] people that stress makes you sick, that it increases your risk of everything from the common cold to heart disease, depression, and addiction, that it kills brain cells, damages your DNA, and makes you age faster.”  

Once people were educated on how bad stress was, the idea was we would reduce the stress in our lives, and this would make us healthier and happier.But that wasn’t the result.

“No matter the audience,” writes Kelly, “nobody ever came up afterward to say, “Thank you so much for telling me how toxic my stressful life is.  I know I can get rid of the stress, but I’d just never thought to do it before!”

In fact, by talking about stress in this way, Kelly and her fellow psychologists were training people to see stress as toxic – which is dangerous.  

Because new scientific research suggests it isn’t stress itself which is harmful, but our belief that stress is toxic that causes us harm.

More tomorrow. 

 _____________________

Reflection:  Think back on when I made a significant behavior change.  What motivated me to make the change?  What are the implications for me?

Action:  Journal my answers to the questions above.  

What a crisis looks like

Monday through Thursday we explore ideas from authors, thought leaders, and exemplary organizations.  On Friday, I share something we are doing at PCI in our quest to earn a spot on Fortune magazine’s 100 Best Companies to Work For.  In the world.

1: This week in RiseWithDrew we’ve been exploring the mindset and practices of Ritz Carlton, which has elevated the guest experience to the highest level.

At PCI, two of the five pillars of our notthebigcompany culture are client-specific:  our goal and our client promises.  

2021 marks the 100th anniversary of my grandfather Rocky Clancy starting our predecessor firm, the Rockwell F. Clancy Company.  The last ten years have been good ones at PCI (we feel very Blessed!).  But if you last 100 years, there are certainly going to be challenging periods as well.  One of these challenging periods occurred in the mid-2000s.  

It was out of one of this periods that our goal and our client promises were created.   

PCI was an early leader in providing online communities for colleges and universities.  In the early 2000s, 18 of the nation’s top 25 universities, as ranked by US News, were PCI clients, including Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Northwestern.  We believed this was the future of our company.  

We stumbled.  

We began by creating an online community website for each of our clients.  The benefit of this approach is we could customize each site.  The disadvantage was it was difficult to roll out new features to all clients.  We added new functionality one site at a time.  And, each code set was different.  What worked well when we had ten clients became a nightmare as we grew to 50, then 75, then 100 clients.

We needed a technology platform.

Turns our creating a technology platform is complex.  And, expensive.  

We had two sets of developers: one working on the existing sites responding to client requests; one creating the new platform.  

The old business adage: “It always takes longer and costs more” was our reality.  One year turned into two.  As we started our third year of developing the new platform, we were in trouble.  Clients were impatient.  Clients were leaving.

An even bigger problem was we were neglecting our traditional business of collecting data and publishing alumni and membership directories.  With the two development teams, expenses were climbing as revenue was falling from $10 million to $6 million.  

That’s what a crisis looks like.

2: But, we are a resilient bunch at PCI.  To last 100 years, that’s a requirement.  

We realized our traditional business of helping our clients collect data from their constituents was still valuable.  [Side note: still is today].  We finished the technology platform which also became the technology platform for our traditional business, too.

And, we doubled down on pleasing our clients.  We have always taken great pride in serving our clients at the highest level.  But we had slipped.  And, we knew it.  As Jim Collins writes in Good to Great, great companies “confront the brutal facts.”

We started having difficult conversations.  What did we need to do to reclaim our reputation and become the company we wanted to be?

“Every client should be referenceable.”  That was a phrase that came out of these conversations.  That became our rallying cry.  That became our goal.

We wanted to delight our clients so each one would say good things about PCI.  Every client would refer us internally to their colleagues and externally to their peers.

Every client.  Every call.  Every interaction.

3: The next question was: How?  How do we do it?

One of the tenets of our notthebigcompany culture is we create it together.  So, we asked all of our associates to write down their very best ideas on how to make every client referenceable.  They did.  We received over 500 ideas.  [One of our associates actually wrote two chapters of a book on the topic – true story.]  

Next, our then VP for People Deborah Dale and I sat in a conference room and took all the ideas and began sorting them.  Five themes emerged.  These five things became our five client promises: Be proactive. Be accountable. Be trustworthy. Be positive.  Be passionate.

We start every meeting at PCI by stating our goal: Every client should be referenceable.  We make every client referenceable by living our five client promises each and every day.

More next week.

_______________________

Reflection:  How can we elevate the client experience in my organization?  Is there an idea that has worked in the past that could be re-introduced?

Action:  Do it.

What’s makes customer service memorable?

1: Chris Hurn’s son couldn’t fall asleep.  

Their family had just returned from a vacation on Amelia Island, Florida.  Joshie, the boy’s beloved stuffed giraffe, had accidentally been left behind.

“Joshie is fine,” Chris told his son, “He’s just taking an extra-long vacation at the resort.”  The boy seemed to buy it and eventually drifted off to sleep, write Chip and Dan Heath in their terrific book, The Power of Moments. 

Later that night, a Ritz Carlton staffer called and shared that Joshie had been found.  A relieved Chris asked for a favor:  Would someone take a photo of the giraffe by the pool to show he’d been vacationing?

The lost giraffe provided an opportunity for what Ritz Carlton calls a “plus one.”

Later that week, Joshie arrived with a binder full of photos.  “One showed him lounging by the pool, another showed Joshie driving a golf cart,” Chip and Dan write.  “Others captured him hanging out with a hotel parrot, getting a massage in the spa (with cucumber slices covering his eyes), and even monitoring security cameras in the control room.”

2: Earlier this year I had the privilege of taking a virtual course from Ritz Carlton titled: “Best Practices & Foundations of Our Brand.”

One of the key takeaways was how to elevate the service experience.

While each Ritz Carlton associate is entrusted with up to $2,000 per guest, per day to solve guest problems, the firm believes strongly it’s not about money.  [Note: the average amount spent to resolve guest issues is $65 per incident.]

It’s about creativity. 

Which requires us to slow down and take the time to anticipate and get inside the mind of our clients.

The goal at Ritz Carlton is not to deliver “customer service.”  But “memorable customer service.”  To create memories for their guests.  To elevate each interaction like the story of Joshie above.  To enhance each encounter by asking: What can we do right now to “plus one” this experience.

3: At Ritz Carlton, the aim is not “satisfied” clients.  But “engaged” clients who have an active relationship with the brand.  Loyal clients who can’t imagine a world without Ritz Carlton.  

To create loyalty like this requires us to focus on the psychological component of customer service: the heart, the psyche, and creating an emotional connection with the brand. 

Brands have functional and emotional benefits.  The functional benefit is based solely on the attributes of the product or service.  The emotional benefit is the positive feelings we get from purchasing and using the product or service.

Ritz Carlton believes their brand is not a product or a logo, but a story that is always being told.  The Ritz Carlton brand is an experience in the mind of the client.  It’s the emotion that experience evokes.  

More tomorrow.

______________________

Reflection: What opportunities are there for my organization to “plus one” the experience of our clients?

Action:  Discuss with a colleague or small team.

How stories bring Starbuck’s values to life

1: The year was 1983.  Starbucks had four stores which sold only whole bean coffee beans and had no seating.  

Howard Schultz had recently been hired and was sent on a business trip to Italy.  “People think I’m the founder of Starbucks.  I was an employee when Starbucks only had four stores,” explains Howard, the former Starbucks CEO in Carmine Gallo‘s terrific book The Storyteller’s Secret.

While traveling abroad, Howard fell in love with Italy and “the romance and the theater of coffee.”  He returned from his trip convinced Starbucks was in the wrong business.

“What I wanted to bring back was the daily ritual and the sense of community and the idea that we could build this third place between home and work in America.  It was an epiphany.  I was out of my mind.  I walked in and saw this symphony of activity,” he remembers.  “And coffee being at the center of the conversation, creating that sense of community.  That is what spoke to me.”

The founders of Starbucks weren’t interested in Howard’s vision, however.  

So, he left and started his own specialty coffee store.  By 1987, he owned three espresso bars.  At which point, Howard was given the opportunity to purchase Starbucks when the founders ran into financial difficulties.  

The rest is history.  Today, Starbucks has over $23 Billion in revenue and more than 349,000 associates.

2: Howard has never forgotten his hardscrabble roots, however.  And, his backstory has informed the purpose of the organization he has helped build.

When Howard was seven years old, he vividly remembers the day his father Fred broke his ankle while working as a diaper service deliveryman.  This event began a downward spiral for his family.  Unable to work, Howard’s dad had no income, no health insurance, no workers comp.  Nothing to fall back on.

“That image of my father, slumped on the family couch, his leg in a cast unable to work or earn money, and ground down by the world – is still burned in my mind,” he recalls.

“I never set out to build a global business,” Howard states.  “I set out to build the kind of company that my father never had a chance to work for.  One that treats all people with dignity,” 

In 1988, shortly after his father passed away, Starbucks became one of the very first companies in America to give health insurance to all its workers—including part-timers.  A benefit like this was very unusual at the time, especially in retail.

Three years later, Starbucks gave stock ownership to all its associates.  Since its inception, “Bean Stock” has generated more than $1.5 billion in pre-tax gains for the company’s baristas and managers, helping them make “down payments on homes, finance cars, pay off loans, even pay for weddings.”

3: Howard has “never grown tired of telling the stories of his childhood or his visit to Italy.  And it’s a good thing he hasn’t,” Carmine writes.  “There’s a direct correlation between his stories, engaged employees, and satisfied customers who view his shops as something more than just a place to get their morning jolt.”

Howard is a master storyteller.  

His origin stories hit on what marketing professor Julie Napoli calls the three dimensions of authentic brands: heritage, sincerity, and commitment to quality.  “Customers want to know where a product comes from, who the people are behind it, and how committed they are to delivering a quality product,” writes Carmine.  “Customers don’t buy a brand or a logo as much as they buy into a set of values.”

And, how do we bring theoretical concepts and values to life?

By telling stories.  Like Howard Schultz.

More tomorrow.

___________________________

Reflection:  What is the origin story of my organization?  How does this story drive the values of the organization? 

Action:  Set aside time to document or review my organization’s origin story.  Tell it.

Why Steve Jobs introduced the villain before the hero

1: The year was 2003.  Steve Jobs was about to reinvent the music industry.

“He persuaded millions of music lovers that it was a good idea to pay for something many of them were getting for free on peer-to-peer file-sharing programs,” writes Carmine Gallo in his terrific book The Storyteller’s Secret: From TED Speakers to Business Legends, Why Some Ideas Catch on and Others Don’t.

How did Steve do it?

By using the classic narrative technique of introducing the villains, Napster and Kazaa, which at the time were sites offering free downloads.

Steve outlined the “dark side” of these sites:

  -Unreliable downloads

  -Unreliable quality [“A lot of these songs are encoded by seven-year-olds and they don’t do a great job.”]

  -No previews

  -No album art

  -It’s stealing [“It’s best not to mess with Karma.”]

Steve then demonstrated how the typical user when interfacing with the villain would have to guess among the 50 or 60 files of the same song to download.  

“The download is slow as molasses, and craps out half way through,” Steve stated.

The process could take up to 15-minutes: “What this means is you’ll spend an hour at that rate and you’ll get four songs; four songs that cost you four bucks from Apple and you calculate that you are working for under minimum wage.”

Steve challenged the idea that consumers would object to paying 99 cents a song.

“How much is 99 cents?  How many of you had a Starbucks latte this morning?  Three bucks.  That’s three songs.  How many lattes got sold across the U.S. this morning?  A lot.  99 cents is pretty affordable.”

2: Time to introduce the hero.  

Steve then outlined the benefits of using the new iTunes music store:

  -Fast, reliable downloads

  -Pristine encoding

  -Previews of every song

  -Album cover art

  -Good Karma

“In 10 minutes Jobs had completely transformed the mindset of those who didn’t believe in paying 99 cents, let alone any price, for the songs they were already downloading,” Carmine writes.  “He also convinced skeptical analysts that the service would provide a strong enough benefit to encourage music lovers to spend 99 cents a song and make money for Apple.”

3: Storytelling is a critical 21st-century skill for business leaders.  This week we will be doing a deep dive into the key elements of how to become a great storyteller.

Lesson #1: When facing a skeptical audience, begin by painting a picture of the villain before introducing our product or service as the conquering hero.  The villain/hero narrative drives home the problem our idea solves.

“Simple can be harder than complex,” Steve once said.  “You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.  But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

More tomorrow.

___________________

Reflection: What villain could I introduce the next time I am attempting to persuade a person or audience?

Action:  Look for an opportunity to experiment with the villain / hero framework today.

Mental Health: Let’s Talk About It

Earlier this year, PCI made the decision not to return to our offices.  We will continue to work virtually.  

We have office space in three states – all of which we are looking to sublet.

Work from home.  Work from anywhere.  That is our new reality.

There are some definite benefits to the “Work from Anywhere” model.  

Starting with avoiding commuting to work.  Each week we get hours of our life back.  Turns out this is a big deal.  The research suggests “the more time you spend getting to and from work, the less likely you are to be satisfied with life.” 

But there are also some real concerns with working virtually.  

Concern #1?

Mental health.

One of the other benefits from working from home is (potentially) fewer distractions which allows us to focus and get our work done.

But what are these distractions we are avoiding?

People.

Yes, we are better able to focus, but we also miss out on the dozens of daily, in-person interactions with our colleagues.  Which can lead to feelings of isolation.  

Looking at social media, it’s easy to look at highlight reels of other people’s lives and fall into the trap of thinking it’s only us who struggles.  We can all “turn it on” or “turn it up,” but that doesn’t mean the seemingly put-together people we see each day on Zoom don’t struggle.

At PCI, we are having conversations about how we can best support our associates who are experiencing mental health challenges.  

Step one is awareness.  Always.  Later today we will hold a meeting open to all our associates to create some space to talk about mental health challenges and the resources we provide.  

Several of our associates are planning to share their personal experiences about the importance of being proactive in addressing mental health issues.  

When my wife Julie died from cancer in August of 2018, my youngest daughters and I participated in a grief counseling program through a local church that made a tremendous difference in our lives.  I had also been married previously and went through a painful divorce. I plan to share during our meeting today how meeting with a counselor was a key step for me in moving forward.

We will also review some of the terrific services we make available to our associates in addition to our health insurance plan.  We have partnerships with several firms with expertise in different areas:

  -MINES & Associates: provider of virtual counseling services available to all PCI associates and family members

  -Marketplace Chaplains: personalized and proactive chaplain care

  -PCI THRIVES: an internal Wellness Platform provided by Prevention Cloud

  -Twice weekly Mindfulness Meditation + weekly Chair Yoga led by Eric Mosley, Black Mat Yoga

I would also be interested in any ideas or programs your organization offers.  Please feel free to reach out to me directly at dclancy@publishingconcepts.com.

____________________________

Reflection:  What are my feelings and assumptions around mental health issues?  Are there actions I could take to better support myself, my colleagues, family members or friends?  

Action: Journal about the questions above.